A few years ago I had a urinary tract infection that lasted five months. For anyone who has had one, it won’t come as any great surprise that I became depressed. One day I was walking upstairs and noticed the picture you see on every one of these web pages. It had been hanging on my wall ever since I had left home at age 18. “I wish I could get her back,” I thought as I walked past the picture. I went back and couldn’t hold back the tears as I looked up at that delighted, joyous little face. After sitting at my computer for two hours, I had completed a 20-page letter to ‘little Nancy.’ I knew I had a book to write. Once I was done, I asked two of my friends to read the book and tell me if they thought the book would have meaning for other women. One of them gave the book to a friend of hers as well. When the three women arrived at my house to give me editing suggestions, that is not what they brought back to me. Instead they were each bursting with the memories my book had unleashed in them, which they wanted to share. We talked for hours about what they had remembered, and I asked questions to elicit more detail. We laughed, we cried, we paid attention, and we each learned a great deal about one another and ourselves. They told me that not only did I have to publish the memoir “Little Nancy: The Journey Home”, but I needed to add a workbook with questions much like the ones I had asked each of them that afternoon, chapter by chapter. I could help other women begin a journey like the one I had taken and that they had just begun. They might not find what I had: that joyous little girl; but they would most certainly find parts of themselves they believed they had lost a long time ago.
I dedicate these pages, and this memoir, to all of you who want to go down this extraordinary path.
“An amazingly creative exploration of developing awareness! As adult Nancy reveals what “Little Nancy” discovers about life, readers have the opportunity to reflect on their own life, to grow in wisdom and most of all to appreciate themselves and their own unique journey through time.” —Patricia Evans, author, “The Verbally Abusive Relationship”
